Patriot Defensive Missile Battery Passes First Scud Test in a Flash : Saudi Arabia: The skies light up as it destroys an incoming Iraqi Scud near an airfield for U.S. attack planes.

“Condition red! Condition red! Don your gas mask!”

The voice, calm but demanding, boomed over the public address system at this base in eastern Saudi Arabia. It was 4 a.m. Friday and somewhere in the darkness above, an Iraqi-fired Soviet-made Scud missile was hurtling toward the airfield from which several squadrons of planes are conducting round-the-clock bombing raids on Iraq and Kuwait. All that stood between the Scud and its target was a U.S. Patriot missile battery--a sophisticated, high-tech defense system originally developed to shoot down enemy aircraft.

In recent years, the Army has modified Patriot batteries to attack incoming missiles. The system has been in place in Germany since the early 1980s but has never been tested in combat.

Two Patriot missile batteries were delivered to Israel two weeks ago, according to U.S. sources, but they are not expected to be ready for combat for weeks. At least eight Iraqi Scud missiles struck Israel early Friday.

In the Patriot battery’s control room in Saudi Arabia, two lieutenants and a sergeant monitored the system. Its radar locked on to the incoming missile and followed the arching trajectory, relaying information through a computer to a television screen that displayed a series of digital blips. The order to fire the Patriot was made automatically by the computer.

Moments later a huge flash lit up the skies as the Patriot struck the Scud. A thunderous roar filled the night, and the Scud, no more than 1,000 feet off the ground on its downward trajectory, according to some eyewitnesses--fell to earth in a thousand pieces. The Patriot had passed its first test.

“We didn’t expect it at that moment, but it was there, we reacted properly and it was gone,” said Lt. Col. Leeroy Neel, 42, of Houston, commander of the 2nd Battalion (Patriot) 7th Regiment Air Defense Artillery, a unit whose heritage dates back to the Indian Wars.

The Patriot is key to the allies’ defense of Saudi Arabian cities, oil installations and cities. Each Patriot is launched from a trailer truck with a dumpster-like hydraulic lift.

“There’s absolutely nothing that can defend itself against the Patriot,” Sgt. 1st Class Steve Gebert, 39, of Juneau, Alaska, said last month when journalists visited a Patriot site.

Israel first requested the Patriot batteries last August, only weeks after Saddam Hussein’s troops invaded Kuwait. Each of the two batteries delivered early this month consists of 16 launchers and missiles.

U.S. sources said that American military officials gave first priority to supplying the Patriot weapons systems to U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia.

A team of 50 Israeli air force specialists is being trained in Texas to man the missile batteries, but the training will not be completed until next month, according to U.S. sources. And Israel may have to wait until April for the special “Pac-2” anti-missile missiles and sophisticated computer programs needed to shoot down incoming Iraqi Scuds. Until then, the batteries in Israel will be capable only of attacking enemy aircraft.

“There’s a gigantic timing problem here,” one Pentagon official said earlier this month.

Lt. Col. Neel said the Patriot’s detection gear identifies incoming missiles or aircraft and prints their tracks on the television screen. After he described the Patriot’s first intercept Friday to a group of pool journalists, a dozen soldiers standing nearby cheered his account.

The weapon is capable of identifying the incoming object, aiming the launcher and firing when the missile comes within range. The fact that the Scud appeared so low to the ground may have indicated that the Patriot caught the missile at the 11th hour.

Not knowing whether the Scud was carrying chemicals, the men in Neel’s battery donned their chemical suits and gas masks. Neel said it has not been determined if the Scud had a high-explosive or chemical payload. He said the Army is trying to recover pieces of the destroyed missile.